At the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, hundreds of women with disabilities arrived to find uneven terrain, stairs without alternatives, no sign language interpretation, and no funding for attendant care. That gap between the environment policymakers imagine and the reality of the bodies that inhabit it is what feminist disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “misfitting”. For thirty years, that discrepancy has defined the relationship between women with disabilities and Canada’s global policies.

I argue that feminist disability activists have been the ones driving change. In my research, I have traced three encounters in which Canadian women with disabilities used the knowledge that comes from misfitting to push their way into policy spaces that had not imagined them, and, in doing so, reshaped those spaces.

Beijing and Its Afterlife

Attendance estimates suggest that somewhere between 200 and 400 women with disabilities showed up to both the NGO Forum and the official conference. Canada funded forty women to attend the Forum through the Canadian Beijing Facilitating Committee; five were women with disabilities. When the barriers at the venue became impossible to ignore, women with disabilities organized protests that drew international media coverage. Attendees recalled that journalists took women’s disability rights seriously, covering the struggle as a fundamental human rights matter rather than the usual superficial human interest piece.

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action mentioned women with disabilities thirty-two times, mostly in passing lists of marginalized populations. The International Disability Alliance later........

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